No. The instrument cluster is the thing I hate most about my Mazda3, even though I have the other cluster with the analogue speedo and smaller tach. Yes, Jason, you do need an analogue speedometer, because like an analogue watch it’s more user-friendly for access to the information most drivers need. I don’t need to…

Didn’t the Pirates make money for a few years by fielding a mostly minimum-contract team and collecting revenue sharing, before starting to rebuild through draft picks?

Which is weird, because it was Brady’s choice to have the surgery performed in California by his friend and occasional golf partner, rather than by any surgeon at a New England medical center. Some players are right to wonder whether team-associated doctors are unbiased, but a random staph infection contracted at a…

Last year there were a bunch of comments ridiculing this practice, but my thesis is that it is easier to clean off both the wipers and the windshield when the former are not frozen to the latter. Ice can be broken off a freestanding wiper by gently flexing it; when it’s frozen to the windshield, the blade can tear…

Excuse me, it was apparently a Jaguar. She avoided conviction because the police failed to apply any field sobriety tests because she previously served a short part of a sentence for cocaine smuggling and they thought her parole would just be voided. But Cooke’s lawyers did try to use that news to try to get her…

To be fair to the Squire, he has little-to-no responsibility for the way she turned out; he and her mother (45 years his junior) were only married 73 days, and never having wanted another child at the age of 75, he had minimal contact until his death when she was 10. That was a fun time to be a Washingtonian, though,…

I’ve never thought that they do look the “same” unless you are only looking dead on with nothing in view to establish scale. Not being able to remember which is which is not the same thing as them looking identical.

Worrying that the highest sales volume in history isn’t going to continue ad infinitum is ridiculous; of course there will be future recessions, most people who wanted new cars have already bought one recently, and new cars are more durable than ever.

I was driving my elderly father’s car once and couldn’t get much air through the vents and raising the fan speed created a horrible beating racket. While the car was parked in his detached garage and driven infrequently, mice or chipmunks had turned the air box and vent system into a rodent condominium complex,…

It seems amusing, but there are plenty of people still living who remember when virtually nowhere had self-service pumps. The revolution took off as a response to the ‘73 oil embargo when gasoline first increased from about 25 cents/gal to triple that. Of course, the attractive savings occurred because jobs were…

6 cubic feet extra vs. the Fit is not impressive, it weighs 20% more but only has 10% more power and torque, and it doesn’t handle as well. I want to like it more, but high seating has to be a bigger priority than it is to me.

President Obama didn’t “give” Iran money; the US returned the money Iran paid 40 years ago for F-14s that Grumman never delivered. Had the US waited for the International Court of Justice to rule in Iran’s favor instead of settling, the amount might have been four times as great.

I didn’t think it was possible for Honda to create a worse styling atrocity than the Civic 4-door, but the Accord proved me wrong. In little more than one year, they have stomped all over Hyundai-Kia, Nissan, and Toyota for ugliest lineup of vehicles on the American road.

It looks like an add-on built to accommodate a winch. 5-mph bumper standards didn’t apply to trucks or “multi-purpose vehicles” (AMC Eagle, etc.).

Of course he’s ignorant, but that doesn’t explain all of his various behavior problems, which is why some believe he suffers from dementia, or my favored theory, tertiary syphilis (yes, it could have been cured if diagnosed early enough, but he is just the type of person would refuse to believe or acknowledge that he…

The thought experiment was Schrödinger’s but the principle he was criticizing was Heisenberg’s (+Einstein’s and Bohr’s).

I believe that there have been some winter tires designed to give up some snow and ice performance in favor of grip on cold dry pavement, e. g. the no-longer-made Cooper WM-SA2, which I still have on my Mazda3. Consumer Reports’ tire tests among others break out different weather type’s performance so you can better…

According to an episode of QI, when the heraldric cat is in profile especially rampant or upright, it is called a lion; while if it is shown facing, especially horizontal, it is called a leopard.

You plug the lights in, start at the bottom next to the trunk and wrap around a major branch going out, then move to the next major bottom branch and wrap around back in to the trunk, then alternate until you move up to the next ring of branches, and so forth until the top. You don’t run out of lights because you buy…

This car was a category below the cars you’re comparing it to. It was more comparable to a CRX, and typical of Toyota was positioned a bit orthogonal to its logical competition. Since non-Si CRXs had 92hp or less, the Paseo’s 100 wasn’t so bad.